


Don't Tell Me Truth Hurts

by knowledgekid



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Pre-Canon, bank robbery reference, margo is sweary, offensive use of the f-word, the bottomless flask is bottomless, yes there are magic police
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 16:23:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16726812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knowledgekid/pseuds/knowledgekid
Summary: Casual acquaintances Margo and Eliot get teamed up for the trials and have to disclose their deepest truths to one another. Round and round they go until they finally hit on what makes them their truest selves. Plenty of bonding and angst ensues.





	Don't Tell Me Truth Hurts

Margo wasn’t exactly shocked when she and Eliot were paired for the Trials. Surprised, maybe, that whoever was running this game had been smart enough not to pair them with one of their disposable fuck buddies. Surprised someone else had noticed they sometimes shared contraband cigarettes between classes, sometimes kept each other’s drinks full at parties before they each set off into their separate, private distractions. Surprised that someone had noticed that in a place where each seemed the snarky, glittering center of attention, both were friends with no one. 

“So. Hansen. How do we do this thing?” Eliot asked. They stood on top of the bell tower, both resolutely looking down over the Lawn spreading out before them. 

Of course he’d defer to her. He was flashier at spellwork, they both knew, but she was the real workhorse of the two of them, the one who really understood the theory behind it. Anyone at Brakebills mistaking her perfect smoky eye for a lack of brain power had been quickly disabused. Not that she fought in academic scrum for top marks. Margo was, quite simply, a really fucking good magician. 

“First, we strip. Is that going to be a problem?” 

“Is that going to be a problem for you?” 

“Honey, I make naked look good. Not that you would care.” 

“Girls are like Thai food. There’s nothing like a good pad thai once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to live on it.” 

Margo turned around. “Unzip me,” she ordered. “And take your fucking clothes off, Eliot.” 

She knew she looked good. By the way he held himself, she knew he thought the same about himself, and she had to admit, he was a pretty good specimen, all those lovely curls, runner-lean. The line from Ziggy Stardust rose unbidden: _came on so loaded man/ well-hung, snow-white tan._

“If you’re done looking at my dick,” he said. 

“They’re sort of my specialty,” she shot back. “Now we have to paint each other.” 

They did it, solemnly, like children preparing to play Indian War. Then the ropes tightened up on the wrists and they had until midnight. 

“All right. Your deepest truth. Go,” Eliot said. He fished a flask and a pack of Parliament Light 100s out of his discarded pants. “Shot and a smoke?” 

“Thanks.” Margo put the cigarette into her mouth and leaned towards Eliot, who ignited it with a snapped spark. A long drag, then a heavy slug from the flask. Whiskey. It burned but good going down. 

“Have as much as you want, it’s bottomless,” he said. “So. What is your deepest truth?” He lowered his voice on the last two words, like a gameshow host. 

“I don’t know. What the fuck does that even mean?” 

“Fuck if I know.” 

“It’s not your deepest secret. The two aren’t the same thing.” 

Eliot nodded slowly. “No,” he said. “No, they aren’t the same. Not necessarily.” 

She took another slug. “Your truth. What makes you who you are, I guess. The deepest thing that makes you who you are.” 

“That’s easy,” Eliot said. “I’m an inveterate alcoholic who drinks because he despairs of a real connection to other human beings.” 

They looked down. The ropes stuck firm. 

“Guess it won’t be that easy,” Margo said. She shivered. It was starting to get cold out here. She sucked at the cigarette and kept drinking. At least the alcohol would keep them warm. Eliot took the flask from her. Tiny knots of students, their naked bodies shining in the moonlight, dotted the maze far below. She shuffled her feet against the old stone. 

“I fuck guys out of a pathological need to seek and then discard connection before I can be discarded,” she offered. Ouch. That one hurt to acknowledge to someone you’d shared little more than nicotine with. 

“Insightful,” Eliot said. “But I don’t think that did it either, I’m afraid.” 

“Well, we just jumped into the fucking deep end, didn’t we? No what’s your favorite color, how’d your childhood pet die, mommy didn’t love me and daddy hit me sometimes.” 

“Well, mommy didn’t love me and daddy did hit me more than sometimes,” Eliot said. 

“Daddy was more of a yeller than a hitter.” 

“Fuck, it’s cold up here.” Eliot hugged himself. 

“C’mere.” Margo sat down on the cursedly frigid stone and pulled Eliot next to her. “We can share body heat. At least we both know this is going to be the least sexy thing we do like, ever.” 

“Pretty much, yeah. Makes it easier to share the booze, too.” They curled against each other, roped hands in their laps, her head against his chest. Neither of them said that this way it was easier not to see each other’s faces. 

“So what made you who you are?” Margo asked. 

Eliot snorted. “Being a gay kid in Oregon. Getting outed in a rural high school where everyone was involved in a passionate love affair with the Second Amendment. What about you?” 

“Being a prettier girl in a city of pretty girls and using it to get the attention I couldn’t get elsewhere.” 

The ropes still held fast. 

“This is bullshit,” Eliot complained. 

“No,” Margo corrected him. “It’s called truth magic, dipshit. And we have to figure this out before midnight because I am not going back to LA for you or anyone else in this motherfucking place.” It came out with a little more heat she intended, but fuck it. She was on her way to getting drunk. 

“Why not?” Eliot asked. “LA’s not that bad. I mean, fuck, it’s not like it’s fucking Oregon.” He took another swig. 

“No, it’s —” she struggled to find a way to explain it to him. “Look, here, at least I have a chance at something.”

“A chance at what?” he prodded. 

“I don’t fucking know. Magic. Being a magician. Doesn’t everyone want to be a magician when they grow up? I sure as fuck did.” 

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew it didn’t involve cow shit.” 

“C’mon. Tell me you didn’t read those Fillory books when you were a kid.” 

“Nope. Mom thought they were from the devil. Like Dungeons and Dragons and dancing and card games.” Margo raised her eyebrows and Eliot must have felt it somehow because she could feel him nodding. “Yep. You know those churches where people fall down in the Spirit and speak in tongues? She went to one of those.”

“Jesus.” 

“Literally.” 

“Well, I read the Fillory books. I read all of them over and over. I wanted to be Fiona Chatwin so bad, I like, made my parents call me Fiona. Not that they noticed. It was mostly a few weeks of me yelling at them to call me Fiona and them saying ‘Sorry dear’ and finally I got sick of it.” She took a hard pull of whiskey. It had mostly stopped burning by then. 

“Ouch.” 

“Yeah, so much for that dream, right? Well, fuck them, because here I am — tied up naked on top of a bell tower waiting for the truth magic to kick in so I can stay in fucking magic school.” She took another drink. “CALL ME FIONA NOW, ASSHOLES!” Margo yelled out into the dark. She and Eliot collapsed into giggles. 

“Okay, Eliot. But seriously. We’ve established that we both had shitty parents, coupled with shitty parenting, and we attempt to avoid real connection with fucking and alcohol. This is probably the first real conversation either of us have ever had in the history of like, ever. And these ropes are still tighter than a virgin’s pussy.” 

“I killed someone when I was fourteen,” Eliot said softly. 

“What?” Margo asked. 

“It’s how I learned about magic.” 

Eliot told her what she would always, in her mind, call The Accident. An accident, because he didn’t meant it, even if he did. He didn’t really think it would happen, didn’t know that if he just wished hard enough, just pushed hard enough, metal would crush flesh and bone, spray blood all over his favorite dress shirt. She could tell by the stuttered way he told it that he’d never put it into words before: puddled rain reflecting blue police lights, rainbowed oil slicks mixing in Logan’s pooled blood, and all Eliot could think of was his ruined shirt. 

The ropes stuck fast. 

“Do you want to know how I learned about magic?” Margo laughed. “Brakebills came and got me. When I was fourteen. Not like, for an exam. They came to haul me in.” 

“What do you mean, haul you in?” Eliot asked, some suspicion in his voice. 

“Well, when you grow up in LA, you have to get into something. Something girly. And I refused to dance and I wouldn’t be a gymnast and even though I could sing that wasn’t enough, so I got stuck on a horse because my parents caught me reading Misty of Chincoteague when I was six.” 

“Isn’t that like, overly complicated for a six-year-old?” 

“We’re not discussing my academic genius here. Anyway, I got into show jumping. They got me this string of fancy-ass horses. Then there was this one, Casimir. When I was about thirteen, right around when I got my first period, which in retrospect probably had something to do with the magic manifesting.” She imagined Eliot making a face and hit him on the arm. “This is important, Eliot. So be a fucking liberated male and go with it. He was a good jumper. But with me, he was a great jumper. Like a clear-a-five-foot-fence jumper. Which is sort of Olympic level.” She motioned for another cigarette and he lit it, handed it to her. “I swear, I always knew what they horse was thinking. And he always knew what I was thinking. We were this perfect team. And the day after a show where I won a jump-off where the fences hit five-and-a-half feet, the magic police showed up.” 

“The magic police? I didn’t know we had fucking magic police.” 

“Well, we do. Fogg’s got some globe that lights up when people perform unauthorized magic, and usually it’s just hedges, but when someone who’s underage does something big, it apparently lights up like a disco ball. So they made up some lie about some special horse camp, drug me up here to Brakebills, taught me some kind of rudimentary control, and stuffed the fear of Niffinhood into me. Apparently it’s not that uncommon. I wasn’t the only kid here at the time, there was someone else, Bender I think his name was. I don’t remember. They made the whole thing hazy. All I know is that when I got home, the fuckers had made my parents sell my horse. The only thing I really loved. Those assholes took it from me.” She drug on the cigarette fiercely. “I loved that horse.” In a sudden burst of illusion magic, she conjured up an image of a rangy, Thoroughbred-lined animal covered in Appaloosa spots. “He was a handsome fucker, too.” She blew smoke at the horse and wiped it out of the thin air. 

“God, I’m so sorry.” 

“Yeah, well, there was a lot more to be sorry for in my fucking train wreck of a childhood than a promise I’d go to Brakebills if I stayed away from magic. I knew magic existed. I was plugged in. That’s how I managed to rob a bank my senior year in high school.” 

“You robbed a fucking bank?!” 

“Not important right now. We only have a few more hours.” 

They were quiet for a while. Margo thought hard about what the spell could be looking for. Then she knew. She’d known it all along, really. How could she not have known? The fruit of it was everywhere around her, in her. In the way she’d given up poetry to become a kind of fucked up poem herself. 

“You know my family?” Eliot said suddenly. “The whole daddy-hit-me mama-didn’t-love-me bullshit? Add some brothers who beat me up and a whole lot of cowshit and that was childhood. And I was never good enough. Imagine six strapping farm boys with chiclet teeth and then me. The first time they took me hunting I was seven. There was this doe. This beautiful, beautiful doe, just standing in this forest glade under the deer stand. And the sun was glittering down off the dew, just starting to creep over the edges of the mountains, and it was this beautiful, perfect moment, and I hear, ‘Well, shoot the damn thing, boy!’ And someone hits me on the side of the head. Hard. I never figured out if I was one of my brothers or my father but I was so scared I shot. And I killed her. There was so much blood. So much fucking blood. And they hooted and hollered and drug me down to that blood-soaked grass and they painted my face with it, because it was my first deer, and I was sobbing, and the blood mixed with my tears and everything was salt and blood and misery. And then they realized I was crying and why, and it was all, ‘Get up, faggot. Get up, you stupid faggot. Crying over a fucking deer. Fucking Tinkerbell. You fucking fairy. And they hit me. And they hit me, and hit me, and I curled in a ball on the ground in the grass and the blood and they kept yelling names at me. 

“And I believed them. 

“And part of me still believes me. 

“I still carry all those fucking voices in my head. All those voices. All those words. All those kicks and hits and curses calling me a faggot, saying I was never good enough, that I’m a failure, that no one will ever love me. That’s why I fucking drink. That’s why I fuck boys and never call them back. Because part of me still believes them.” 

“Oh, El,” Margo said. She squirmed around and hugged him, hard. “You’re nothing like that. Thank God. You’re nothing like what they said you were.” 

“So when I left, I decided I would create this self as far away from them as I could. And I did. I made myself from the ground up,” he said into her shoulder. “I let people think I was somehow rich and perfect and removed and they fucking believed me, so I became Eliot Waugh, King of Champagne and the Casual Fuck.”

They were tangled together now, close as lovers, Eliot’s tears soaking her bare shoulder. “I was one-in-eight,” she said into his hair. 

“What?” he asked. 

“When I was twelve. I was one of the one-in-eight. You know the statistics. One-in-eight girls who end up raped.” The r-word. She almost choked on it, had never said it aloud. 

“When you were _twelve_?!”

“I was at a sleepover. At Katie Jackson’s house. Her dad said he had something special to show me upstairs. And I was a dumbass who spent her time reading Fillory books and getting good grades, so how the fuck was I supposed to know where this was going?”

“Oh, Margo,” Eliot said. He held her tighter. 

“So he took me upstairs and he told me how pretty I was, how I was prettier than all the other girls, and he fucking raped me. He took my cute little extra extra small Victoria’s Secret pajamas off and raped me. He said all that time riding horses meant I didn’t even bleed, unless I wasn’t a virgin, hahaha, what a cute little slut I was, that we’d have to do it again sometime. Then he slapped my ass and sent me back downstairs to the other girls. It took all of twenty minutes.”

“Jesus.” 

“No,” she said. “No. Because half an hour later, I marched back upstairs. He was sitting in the same study, on the same couch where he raped me, drinking a glass of something dark brown. I put my hands on my hips and told him if he ever touched me, or any other girl again, I’d tell his fucking wife. He laughed in my face. I told him he’d stop laughing when I described his penis in exact detail. He stopped laughing and started begging. I walked out of there with two thousand in hundred dollar bills and a bottle of bourbon.

“They were watching Labyrinth downstairs. I pretended I’d stolen the liquor. We passed it around and got twelve-year-old smashed, and that Bowie line got stuck in my head: _Don’t tell me truth hurts little girl/ Cause it hurts like hell_. And I made a promise. I had been on the bottom once. I would never, ever, ever be there again. I could be raped. Or I could use it. I decided I would use it. And so I started to make myself, piece by piece.”

“I stopped being the good girl and became the problem child. My parents didn’t really notice. They’d pulled me from boarding school by then, which might had actually forced them to care, and put me in private school, where drugs were easier to find than Fun Dip. The sex was hard at first, but it got easier when I realized how simple boys were, how they liked it when you just took charge. I hid all my books. You know, I went to Stanford as an English major and no one ever saw me read or answer a substantial question in class.” 

“You love books.” 

She laughed and looked into him full in the face. “Do you want me to recite 'The Wasteland'?” 

“I thought you had an eidetic memory for spells,” Eliot said. 

“I don’t. But it’s close. I’ve memorized more poetry than most people have ever read. Come see my room sometime. It’s stuffed with romance novels. They’re really classic lit with enchanted covers. Yeah, I love America’s Next Top Model and trance and house music. But when I go to sleep at night, I put on headphones and listen to Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue until I fall asleep.” 

“Why?” 

She shrugged. “It doesn’t fit the image. It’s not me. It’s weak. I’m not weak. I wear dark lipstick and tailored clothes and call people cunts. I fuck boys for fun. I throw tantrums. I don’t listen to fucking Wilco or read poetry or watch — oh my God, you’re going to laugh your ass off — watch The X-Files. I drink. I smoke. I give the best head at Brakebills.” 

“I beg to differ.”

“Excuse me?” 

“I said I give the best head at Brakebills.” 

“We’ll have to discuss that sometime.”

They looked down. The ropes tangled in their laps. Their hands were free. 

And just as they both noticed it, something strange began happening to their backs. Then their legs. And suddenly neither Margo nor Eliot could speak anymore, and they were flying, flying, flying.

**Author's Note:**

> I remain convinced that Margo is as much of a constructed self as Eliot, and I find it interesting to try figure out what could possibly have caused her to form that self. I think the most compelling and likely explanation to be sexual assault combined with an unloving childhood. See the "Beautiful, Languid, and Filthy-Gorgeous" series for what becomes of the ending blow job comments.


End file.
